Book Series
Ok, not Mars-related, but I cast a wide net here and… wow. Wow!
“The studio announced the landmark film’s return to theaters in a widely-circulated release, saying the goal is to give today’s moviegoers the same “cinematic event audiences experienced 50 years ago.””
A new paper from Elon Musk (written before the Falcon Heavy launch, but published this month) with lots of detail on the BFR.
“Our updated design leverages a smaller vehicle, still pretty big but a single vehicle that can do everything that’s needed for greater Earth orbit activity. Essentially we want to make our current vehicles redundant. We want to have one system—one booster and one ship—that replaces Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon. If we can do that, then all the resources that are used for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon can be applied to this system.”
Wernher von Braun was born on this day in 1912. His work on the Saturn V got us to the Moon and he’d have got us to Mars as well if only we’d pursued it.
More on the perils of living on Martian time while on Earth. This is a fun presentation with lots of great mission lore.
A Martian day is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day. To distinguish the two, we use the term “sol” when referring to a Martian day.
Landers we have sent to Mars use special 24 hour clocks with longer seconds than those of Earth, so that a sol is divided into 24 periods, just like on Earth. The operations teams for these landers work and live by the same clocks. This means, for people working on these crews, their schedule shifts 40 minutes later each day. This makes for interesting problems.
Curiosity is at 2000 sols and still going.
(Note the comment regarding sky color)
Looks like we made it: 2,000 sols on Mars, you guys! I’m looking back on 2,000 Martian days of exploration, and…
Posted by NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover on Thursday, March 22, 2018
Life on Mars will be a positive sum game.
Somewhere under those clouds, my characters live. I’m not quite sure where yet.
Smithsonian Magazine 
NPR.org 